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20 Nov 2018 9:48:30am

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Sure you help someone lying injured on the road, or a family hit by a flood or bushfire. Using this site's favorite term, even 'morally obliged'.

You're not morally obliged to keep giving money to someone who has less than you, if the less was produced by bad bets. With more to follow.

European history is a tale of hardship: Constant warfare, plagues and famines. As harrowing as on any other continent. But Europe had the reformation and the Enlightenment. Rationality and science arose from within themselves. Nothing to do with some brief empires. The plagues and famines were figured out and fixed along with a productive mode of living.

The society they live in is determined, eventually, by its inhabitants. If you keep operating under a theocracy, or Marxist dictatorship, or African kleptocracy, you'll be poorer than those that don't. Bad bets. Over and over.

No-one's morally obliged to pick up the tab for those constant bad bets.

( Recommended reading: 'All the Trouble in the World', by P.J. O'Rourke. A serious compilation of data, comparing all the factors thought to lead to various outcomes in Nations. He doesn't conclude anything, but I do: By and large, outcomes rely less on circumstances than Choices. )

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